Retreat from Kabul: The First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-1842 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

The conclusion to be drawn, that properly led his fighting-men were for sure more than a match for the Afghans, passed the General by; the accomplishment in no way rescued him from the passivity that bound him to defensive tactics when attack was vital. Needlessly, he decided now to contribute to the defence of the Bala Hissar — a move which would weaken still more the relatively small force in the cantonments. Accordingly, 400 infantry, two mountain guns, one 9-pounder, one 24-pounder howitzer, two 5½-inch mortars and ammunition — this useful force moved on 3 November up to the Bala Hissar to reinforce the troops already there under Brigadier Shelton, the Second-in-Command.

  What was Shelton to do there? ‘Brigadier Shelton,’ Eyre states, ‘was ordered to maintain a sharp fire on the city from the howitzers and guns and to endeavour to fire the houses by means of shells… from the two mortars; should he find it practicable to send a force into the city he was to do so.’

  Responsibility for any decision he might make to attack the city was thus put squarely on Shelton’s own shoulders, for Elphinstone himself had already said he would not expose the troops to jezail fire in the narrow streets.

  But though Elphinstone spared precious troops to assist in the defence of the Shah in the impregnable Bala Hissar, Trevor with his wife and family, and Mackenzie with troops and rations in a fort commanding the northern outskirts of the city he ignored, though they fought bravely.

  Colin Mackenzie, a dark, aquiline Scot who had distinguished himself with the 48th Madras Infantry in India and was now one of Macnaghten’s assistants in charge of the Shah’s commissariat, lived in the fort of Nishan Khan on the outskirts of the city gardens. The fort held most of the provisions for the Shah’s troops — he refused to have them in the Bala Hissar — with a guard of one havildar (sergeant) a few horsemen and twenty sepoys.

  Mackenzie describes vividly his defence of this important fort at the beginning of the outbreak. Camped close by in a grove of mulberry trees were a force of loyal mercenary jezailchis, commanded by Lieutenant Hassan Khan, and sixty of George Broadfoot’s sappers with wives and children. About 500 yards away to the east was the large tower in which lived Captain Trevor, his wife and seven children, with a small guard of sepoys.

  Early on 2 November news of the riot in Kabul had been brought to Mackenzie and he had ordered the guard to stand to arms. Shortly after, he says, ‘a naked man stood before me, covered with blood from two deep sabre-cuts in the head and five musket-shots in the arm and body. He proved to be a sawar (horseman) of Sir William Macnaghten, sent with a message to Captain Trevor, who had been intercepted by the insurgents.

  ‘This being rather a strong hint as to how matters were going, I immediately ordered all the gates to be secured, and personally superintended the removal of the detachments… with their wives and families, into the fort.’

  A force of several hundred Afghans attacked Mackenzie’s fort almost before he had brought the mercenaries inside. ‘The whole of the gardens,’ Mackenzie relates, ‘were then occupied by the Afghans, from which, in spite of repeated sallies during the day, we were unable to dislodge them; on the contrary, whenever we returned to the fort, they came so near as to be able, themselves unseen, to kill and wound my men through the loopholes of my own defences.’

  Towards the afternoon of 2 November Mackenzie and the jezailchis had fired nearly all their ammunition but that in the soldiers’ pouches. Determined not to give up the fort to the Afghans, Mackenzie sent an urgent request for reinforcements and ammunition.

  Captain George Lawrence, the Envoy’s military secretary, was present in the cantonments when Elphinstone received the message. ‘I proposed to General Elphinstone,’ he relates, ‘to order out two companies immediately to reinforce Mackenzie, and throw fresh ammunition into his fort, volunteering to lead them… My proposal was condemned by the staff as most imprudent, as they feared exposing their men to street firing.’

  Thus, at once Elphinstone abandoned Mackenzie and Trevor and his family in these outposts to their fate. ‘It was in vain that we strained our eyes looking for the glittering bayonets through the trees,’ Mackenzie related wistfully. Attacks went on throughout the night; at dawn on 3 November the enemy were found to be mining the fort, so Mackenzie had a shaft dug down with four resolute men there ready to shoot the attackers as they appeared.

  The women were howling over the dead and dying; at the same time ‘whenever the jezailchis could snatch five minutes to refresh themselves with a pipe, one of them would twang a sort of rude guitar as an accompaniment to some martial song, which, mingling with the notes of war sounded very strangely’.

  Captain Trevor had been holding out in his tower to the east of Mackenzie. Several Afghan chiefs from Kabul, including Osmin Khan, Taj Mahommed Khan and Abdool Rahim Khan had come to see him with offers of help. Nawab Zeman Khan even voluntarily sent one of his younger sons to Trevor as a hostage for his own loyalty — for none of this minority group of chiefs wished then to be involved in the anti-British rising. When the General sent no help, Trevor refused to keep the boy. The chiefs bade him farewell and went.

  Despairing of aid, early next morning, 3 November, Trevor led his wife and seven children, most of whom were carried by his sepoys, out of the tower and by a roundabout route to the cantonments. But they were seen and attacked. ‘On the road,’ Mackenzie relates, ‘a blow was aimed at Mrs. Trevor by an Afghan. A Hindustani trooper by her side saved her by stretching out his bare arm. The hand was cut off by the blow, yet he continued to walk by her with the blood flowing from the stump until they reached the cantonments — an act of true heroism.’

  The Afghans now occupied the ramparts of Trevor’s tower and with their long-range jezails maintained an accurate fire on the western face of Mackenzie’s fort — so accurate that it was cleared of defenders. ‘It was only by crawling on my hands and knees up a small flight of steps and whisking suddenly through the door that I could even visit the tower that had been undermined,’ notes Mackenzie. ‘On one of these visits the sentry told me that there was an Afghan taking aim from an opposite loophole. I looked through our loophole, but could not see him. As I moved my head the sentry clapped his eye to the slit, and fell dead at my feet with a ball through his forehead.’

  That afternoon the Afghans began hammering the ramparts of the fort with light artillery and this, together with the shortage of ammunition, began to lower Mackenzie’s riflemen’s hitherto undaunted spirits. The Afghans next began piling up stacks of firewood ready to burn down the fort door. The twenty horsemen in the fort mutinied and pulled down the interior barricade at one of the gates to try to escape by the speed of their horses, leaving Mackenzie and the rest of the defenders to their fate.

  ‘This I quelled,’ Mackenzie relates, ‘by going down amongst them with a double-barrelled gun. I cocked it, and ordered them to shut the gate and build up the barricade, threatening to shoot the first man who should disobey. They saw that I was determined, for I had made up my mind to die, and they obeyed.’

  Mackenzie and the riflemen had now been fighting for nearly forty hours without let-up. He himself had not eaten anything, owing to weariness, excitement and the fact of his absence for five minutes disheartening the fighting-men. On top of this, the wounded were dying for want of medical aid. He had, he reflected, been left to certain death by his own countrymen, but the Afghan mercenary riflemen had remained loyal to him to the end, even though the enemy, under cover in the nearby gardens, shouted tempting offers to them to seize Mackenzie and come over to them.

  Their leader, Hassan Khan ‘more than once pretended to listen to the overtures of the enemy in order to lure them from under cover, and then sent his answer in the shape of a rifle ball’.

  At last when there was hardly a round left, Hassan came and saluted Mackenzie: ‘I think we have done our duty,’ he said. ‘If you consider it necessary that we should die here, we will die, but I think we have done enough.’

  These words softened Mackenzie’s heart. He had determine
d to die defending the fort, in face of his desertion by the General, but now he yielded and prepared for a retreat in the early part of the night, when — it being the Moslem fast of Ramzan — he knew the Afghans would be at their principal meal.

  The jezailchis were ordered to lead the retreat and to answer appropriately all questions from Afghan sentries; the wounded and the women and children were placed on ponies, all personal baggage was to be left behind and Mackenzie made up the rearguard with a few regular troops. He recalled how a beautiful young Ghurka girl of about sixteen with fair complexion and dark eyes girded up her robe and stuck a sword into her waistband. She threw all she possessed on the ground and said to him — ‘Sahib, you are right, life is better than property.’ Mackenzie never saw her again — she was killed or taken prisoner.

  They rode out into the darkness. The rear, with Mackenzie, became separated from the jezailchis in front and Mackenzie found himself alone with two horsemen and a wailing crowd of women and children. One of the women, unable to carry both her child and her pots and pans, dropped the child and began to make off. Mackenzie drew his sword and thumped her soundly with the flat of it until he made her take up the child, so when a few seconds later he was suddenly attacked his sword was ready.

  He first thought the Afghans who had surrounded him were his own jezailchis — until a shower of sword cuts were aimed at him. ‘Spurring my horse violently, I wheeled around,’ he related, ‘cutting from right to left… and I was lucky enough to cut off the hand of my most outrageous assailant. My sword went clean through the man’s arm, but just after I received such a tremendous blow on the back of the head that, although the sabre turned in my enemy’s hand, it knocked me almost off my horse. The idea passed through my mind — “Well, this is the end of my career, and a miserable end it is, in a night skirmish with Afghans.” But then came the thought that all was right. I commended my soul to God and became insensible, hanging on the saddle by only one foot, but I did hot let go the bridle.’

  Somehow Mackenzie rode through the attackers and two volleys of musketry, then hurled himself against another body of the enemy only to find that they were his own men. Eventually they reached the cantonments safely and the General, who had left him to his fate, sanctimoniously thanked him for holding out for so long.

  Meantime, there had been much talk and no action among Elphinstone and his staff about the need to occupy two forts commanding the cantonments. Among several other forts on the plain Mahmoud Khan’s fort stood 600 yards south of the southern wall of the cantonments — beside the Kabul River bridge, over which ran the road from the King’s Garden (a small wooded park) up to the Bala Hissar. Mahomed Shereef’s fort stood only 150 yards south-west of the cantonments; both forts remained unoccupied by the Afghans on 3 November.

  Like many Afghan forts they were about 80 feet square and about 40 feet high, with walls of sun-baked mud 6 to 8 feet thick at the base narrowing to 3 feet at the top with a higher tower at each corner, and pierced with numerous loopholes for wall-pieces (2-pounder guns) and jezailchis. The British normally took such forts by means of artillery bombardment with 6- or 9-pounders, followed by infantry assault.

  It will be remembered that General Cotton, at Macnaghten’s insistence, to show British goodwill, had allowed the reserves of ammunition to be placed in a fort known as the magazine fort 150 yards south of the southern wall of the fortified cantonments and the huge reserves of food, drink, uniforms and medical supplies in a fort called the commissariat fort about 400 yards south of their south-western corner. Provisions for officers and men, their families and the camp-followers were drawn daily from the commissariat fort, only enough for a day or two being kept in reserve in the cantonment — a hazardous enough arrangement at the best of times.

  But the 150 yards to the magazine fort and the 400 yards to the commissariat fort could both be swept by jezail fire from the intervening Mahomed Shereef’s fort — the route to the commissariat fort indeed, passing barely 150 yards from it. So that, already, with a general rising seeming certain, it was vital to take this fort. Moreover, the store, upon which the lives of the entire force depended, was held only by a junior officer, Lieutenant Warren, and eighty sepoys unsupported by British troops — a force hardly strong enough to ward off attacks by a thousand or more Afghan marksmen.

  Constant criticism of the British command may seem uncharitable. The General was ill and his subordinates were frightened of responsibility, but the fact remains that Lieutenant Warren, who held the key to British survival, was left to himself with a handful of Indian troops; and nothing at all was done to seize Mahmoud Khan’s fort, and the even more important Mahomed Shereef’s fort. Confusion and indecision reigned when action was vital.

  Yet there were on 3 November — the insurrection in the city began early on 2 November — only enough provisions for three days in the cantonments, while in the commissariat fort there was a huge quantity — enough for three months.

  Vincent’s Eyre’s account of the origin of this Alice-in-Wonderland arrangement is worth recalling: ‘Captain Skinner, the chief commissariat officer, at the time this arrangement was made,’ says Eyre, ‘earnestly solicited from the authorities a place within the cantonment for his stores,’ but received the topsy-turvy answer that ‘no such place could be given him, as they were far too busy in erecting barracks for the men to think of commissariat stores’.

  If the General was unconcerned, Lady Sale, that tireless recorder of hourly events, was not. Noting on 3 November with some alarm that there was only enough food for three days in the cantonments, she wrote: ‘Should the commissariat fort be captured we shall not only lose all our provisions, but our communications with the city will be cut off. This fort — an old crazy one, undermined by rats — contains the whole of the Bengal commissariat stores…’

  But there was a safe alternative — the impregnable Bala Hissar. Into it the women, children, camp-followers and families, the troops and the artillery could have been moved during three or four nights, when it was too dark for the Afghan marksmen to see. At the same time, having first temporarily occupied Mohamed Shereef’s fort, enough provisions and ammunition could at the same time have been transported from the commissariat fort to the Bala Hissar as well.

  But this move, which was considered, would have involved stern military action of a kind that the General was then unable to initiate. Perhaps Elphinstone is no more to be blamed than his staff, who seemed to be taking all his decisions for him and were strongly against any such move. ‘As a body,’ Captain Lawrence noted, ‘they were characterised by the most deplorable vacillation and absence of energy’ — men, it would appear, recognised by Elphinstone as kindred spirits. But their reasons for not abandoning the cantonments for the Bala Hissar were, it is hard to believe, financial ones. They feared blame for the cost in pounds sterling of the loss.

  The first hesitations in this developing tragi-comedy of errors were followed by a move of equal import. Having refused to attack Kabul with a force strong enough to make victory sure, the General now in futile fashion sent a force so weak as to make defeat certain. He ordered Major Swayne with a mere 200 sepoys and two 9-pounder guns to join Brigadier Shelton in an assault on the city’s north-eastern gate, opposite the Bala Hissar.

  But Elphinstone’s staff gave Swayne the wrong orders, sending him to the Kohistan Gate, two miles to the west of the appointed Lahore Gate opposite the Bala Hissar. Swayne marched his tiny force there, came under heavy fire at once from the embattled marksmen and lost an officer and twenty men.

  Under what cover he could find, he waited anxiously for Shelton’s force — but it was two miles away, at the Bala Hissar, still waiting for him. Eventually, seeing no sign of its arrival, he did the only thing he could in this desperate situation — he ordered the bugles to blow the retire and took his men back to safety as fast as he could.

  This, another British failure, lashed the Afghans into a frenzy of excitement. After Burnes’s murder, and the
rising, fear of a savage British attack had sent the conspirators into hiding and terrified the mob, who dreaded the crash of British artillery and the bayonets of the merciless redcoats in the city streets. What was their jubilation when instead of the expected bloody reprisal, a weak, incapable force marched up to a strongly defended gate, lost a number of men in an impossible attack and promptly ran away.

  The conspirators seized their chance, came out of hiding and whipped up the fanatic temper of the mob — already drunk with blood and plunder. What was in Kabul at first only an isolated revolt now changed into full-scale rebellion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Just after sunrise on 4 November a force of some 400 Afghan marksmen occupied the Shah’s Garden and Mahomed Shereef’s fort, 150 yards from the south-west corner of the cantonments. This simple but decisive move now enabled them to cut off the British from their food reserves in the commissariat fort: to attack Warren and the sepoys there and to open fire on the cantonments from a sheltered position. They began at once to attack the commissariat fort from behind the walls of the Shah’s Garden. These were the first grim results of the General’s inaction.

  During the afternoon Lieutenant Warren reported the danger of his position in his ramshackle fort — a blunt warning that his ammunition was nearly all gone, his sepoys were little disposed to fight, and that unless reinforced he might have to abandon. Ensign Gordon, aged nineteen, a friend of Warren’s, volunteered to go to his aid and in broad daylight, against heavy jezail fire from Mahomed Shereef’s fort, set out with eighty sepoys encumbered by eleven slow-moving camels laden with ammunition.

  Almost at once Gordon was shot dead. The sepoys tried to go on, but after more than twenty of them had fallen, they turned the camels about and urged them back into cantonments. The first tribute of blood for the initial failure to occupy the fort had been paid.

  Now came a sequence of errors and false moves that tolled doom like a bell. Without a word to Captains Boyd and Johnson, his commissariat officers, Elphinstone ordered a party to be sent to escort Warren back and to abandon the fort and three months’ food to the Afghans — a momentous decision. Bravely, Captain Swayne (not to be confused with Major Swayne) led the party of four officers and 100 men without any covering fire from artillery into the blanket of jezail fire.